Wednesday, June 23, 2004

Justice denied (or at least delayed):Gwen Araujo murder case ends in mistrialApparently juries can't decide whether long slow brutal torture, beating, and strangling is murder when the victim is transgender. The case will be retried, but still, this is awful

I don't understand. It should have been such an obvious murder conviction. Long-time reader Brenda Ann (who first let me know about the mistrial by email) writes:

A sad commentary on the state of mind of our fellow Americans on the value of the life of a transgendered person versus the righteous indignation of her murderers, the following articles point up that a jury of eight men and four women from among our peers could not bring themselves to find these three men guilty of an obviously premeditated murder. Indeed, they did not even seem to consider any of the lesser included offenses of second degree murder, or even manslaughter, instead, bringing forth a hung jury resulting in a mistrial.

One can only hope that during the retrial that is planned that the prosecution makes a more compelling case, and that the new jury will not be so seemingly swayed by homophobia as to look upon the perpetrators as the victims.

As an aside, how in the world could these men have anal sex with Ms. Araujo without seeing with their own eyes that she was not post-operative? Are we to believe they are all blind as well as ignorant of anatomy? The mind boggles.

Anyway, I am extremely grateful to Brenda Ann and Gwendolyn Smith for sending me links to all these articles about the mistrial. From the San Francisco Chronicle (see their sidebar of previous articles on the murder case):

A judge declared a mistrial Tuesday in the trial of three men accused of killing transgendered Newark teen Gwen Araujo after jurors said they could not agree whether to convict the men of first-degree murder.

Judge Harry Sheppard said he believed that the jury was "hopelessly deadlocked" after the jury foreman told him the panel of eight men and four women have been "unable to pass over the point of reasonable doubt. In my personal opinion, further deliberations would not yield a verdict."